Annie and Brian: Placeholder friends.

[dreadedcandiru2]

We're about, oh, nine months or so away from the sequence in which Elly is all giddy and stupid because Greg threw Connie under the bus and made her the lightning rod for Molly's anger and sense of betrayal by contriving to be transfered to Milboring to step on a relationship with a boy who scared him. We know that this leads to Molly being depicted as being a proto-Picky Face Martian Princess because she can't wait to get away from the Great Big Love In Connie's heart and Connie wailing pathetically about wild animals who cruelly give a self-absorbed yahoo who barges into their lives, throws her weight around and treats them like crap her right name. We also know that we're going to watch Elly brainlessly sabotage herself by glibly condemning a boy because she doesn't get that Greg is screening calls and intercepting mail. What we shouldn't lose sight of is that the Poirier-Nichols family isn't the only casualty of Greg's spineless authoritarianism. Annie winds up being shown to the curb because Elly's real friend is back and what's more, Elly doesn't even have the decency to admit what's happening.

It's like how Mike doesn't admit that he really didn't gain a new best friend when Brian moved in. Brian's job was simply to keep Mike warm until his real best friend at the time came back home where he belonged. Hmmm. This is odd. It seems that about the only Patterson who maintained any sort of long-term bond with the Enjos is Liz...and that because Dawn was the first real friend she'd actually made. Weird, eh?